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Wednesday 25 April 2012

WIP mime reference secondary animation

Today I've been adding touches to the animation, I had to animate the quiff as it is quite a big part of the character design, and an essential element of secondary animation.
 I used my reference I collected from the green screen studio, (fortunately for me my hairs been growing really fast lately) and blocked out the shapes of the hair at point where Jake flips his hair back. I've adjusted the timing a little adding a full second to the flip in comparison to the reference and used a bit of exaggeration to emphasise the flip a little more. I wanted to have that old cartoony feel to it, referencing alot of the Tom and Jerry shorts of the MGM studios,  including "Salt Water Tabby". This is the style of animation the group is aiming for,       






I been referring back to my reference whilst adjusting the timing, I still think the timing doesn't feel quite right for the character and i think I've worked out why.
Quick recap, going back to the beginning when we designed the characters during the planning stage, we decided on three characters with contrasting designs. We wanted a really big mime, then a really small mime and the final character which was just right, I have the smallest mime. What I didn't realise was the difference in timing between actions by small and tall people, I'm quite tall (6ft) and Id been using myself as reference for the mimes actions such as the jump and moving across the wall. But the character is much smaller in size (I think he would be around 5ft 5?), he arms and legs are a bit shorter, so I thought I needed smaller person to do the action for me.
 Lucky for me I had Rachael who was just the right size for job, we did a reference shot of the mime actions in the glass windows of the labs.





I watched the playback of the two together and I could see a slight difference in the of the moves, for example when she's moving along the wall, her actions are little more snappy and faster. Her jumping is alot faster and has a "spring" to it, something I could add to the mime performance to make the actions more believable and less floaty.  Rachael's poses were also a little different to mine because of the physical build

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